News Archives

By Dan Verbeck

By Teresa Sheffield

Kansas City, MO – The Kansas City Health Department is advising people to take precautions against disease-carrying ticks and mosquitoes. The Department reports that the number of people infected with West Nile virus and tick-borne disease is on the rise in the area. Department spokesman, Jeff Hershberger says now is the time of year to be especially careful.

Hershberger: Basically it's coming up on the West Nile virus season as the summer progresses, and we're right now in the middle of the tick-borne illness season.

By Sylvia Maria Gross

Kansas City, MO – The Kansas City Election Board meets today to redraw the sub-district boundaries in the Kansas City Missouri school district. New subdistricts won't effect where children go to school, but could change the balance of representation of the school board.

By Dan Verbeck, KCUR News

By Sylvia Maria Gross

By Susan B. Wilson

Kansas City, MO – On Thursday, the Kansas City Election Board will decide how to re-draw the boundary lines for the Kansas City Missouri school district. Redistricting won't change where children go to school. Rather, the new sub-districts could have a big impact on the next school board, which has six subdistrict members and three at-large.

By Alex Smith

By Elana Gordon

Prairie Village, KS – Prairie Village has passed a smoking ban. Council members approved the ordinance in a meeting Monday night. Councilmember David Belz is chair of the Smoke-Free Task Force and says there's been a growing momentum for a smoking ban ever since the task force started up in 2005.

Belz: I think that this point was coming for a long time, and so I'm kind of glad just to get to that point.

By Sylvia Maria Gross

Kansas City, MO – One in every hundred people in the United States today is behind bars. And being in prison is a strong indicator that once you're released, you'll be back again. A study in the 1990s showed that two thirds of ex-offenders returned to prison within three years. Now, both Kansas and Missouri have recently developed some innovative programs to combat recidivism. Kansas is reducing sentences and establishing a number of alternatives to incarceration. Missouri's prisoner re-entry program has become a national model.

By Dan Verbeck, KCUR News

Kansas City, Mo – Two more lawsuits are being filed against current and former Roman Catholic clergy and the Kansas city-St. Joseph diocese, alleging child sex molestation and cover up.

By Elana Gordon

Kansas City, MO – A recent study by the consumer advocacy group, Families USA, found that the majority of states, including Kansas and Missouri, don't require insurers to sell individual coverage to all of its applicants. Most states also don't prohibit insurance companies from charging individuals higher premiums based on their health status. Dan Smith of the American Cancer society says that makes individual health coverage difficult to obtain, especially for those most in need of medical care.

By Dan Verbeck, KCUR News

Kansas City, MO – The Midwest's needs in financial and banking policy are being analyzed and drawn in the newest building in the federal reserve system. It brings a move of the region's money repository from downtown, where armored trucks maneuvered narrow streets to tote vast supplies of cash destined for local banks. The $200 million regional Central Bank has been dedicated.

By Laura Spencer

Kansas City, MO – Kansas City's Tax Increment Financing or TIF Commission Wednesday deadlocked on a financing request to rehabilitate a building in the Crossroads Arts District near the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts.

The TIF Commission deadlocked with a vote of five to five and made no recommendation on philanthropist Shirley Helzberg's tax break request for the Vitagraph Film Exchange Building, once used to distribute motion pictures at 17th and Wyandotte.

By Sylvia Maria Gross

Kansas City, MO – More than half a million people will be released from prison this year. The job prospects for those offenders are pretty dim. Since 9/11, many companies now run security checks on every hire, and even small businesses can use the internet to dig up a candidate's past. But there's one group of business owners that are often willing to give an ex-offender a second chance. KCUR's Sylvia Maria Gross reports.

By Dan Verbeck, KCUR News

Independence, MO – The price of scrap metal meets the greening of the Kansas City region. For the first time, The Missouri Conservation Department will retrieve bullets fired at a rifle range: what could become tons of lead and copper.